Is your PC the stable, error-free platform you need? We didn't think so. Leigh Dyer, David Kidd and Ty Pendlebury present the essential guide to fixing your PC.

FIC's Condor has answered the call this month, offering gamers an easy to upgrade system, wrapped up in a one of the most innovative cases we've seen.

As far as performance is concerned, the Emagen Lightspeed XPS is a fairly competitive offering. It sits in the middle of the pack as far as price is concerned, but managed to sit at second to third place in most benchmarks - it even came top of the class in 3DMark05. The 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 certainly helped there. And the fact that it’s $600 cheaper than the Pioneer system also works in its favour.

Nominating Sato as our winner for the desktop machines this month was fairly straightforward, especially when compared to deciding the outcome of the closely-fought notebook war. Because, even though the Sato was outdone by one or two systems in terms of performance, nothing beat it on pure value for money.

The Aspire is a very good unit with several features which enhance its usability. It will suit on-the-go entertainment and productivity, at a price that won't burn your wallet.

The ASUS is one tough little cookie. Its cover and palmrest are encased in brushed aluminium lending the unit a reassuring sense of rigidity and roadworthiness. The 15.4" screen is bright, and its default resolution of 1680x1050 makes text sharp but a little small to read unless up close. The unit also comes with a built in TV-tuner, and also sports a TV-antenna output.

As one of the first native PCI-Express cards, the 6600GT has generated quite a bit of excitement: finally, a mid-price card that promises close to high end performance. So the fact that the card is finally available in AGP is good news for those willing to keep their existing AGP kit.

A decent PC with media abilities bolted on, transforming this into a good lounge machine.

Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 was launched with quite a bit of fanfare late last year, and not least of all because it was the first time in its 18 month life Australians could buy systems based on the OS.

The Acer Aspire has a lot of handy multimedia functions that help it work as a desktop replacement/media unit. One of the Aspire’s main selling points is the Arcade feature, which is a Windows Media Centre clone. A button on the notebook fascia opens Arcade, bypassing the Windows OS and enabling all media player functions: DVD, MP3 etc. It works quite well but isn’t as graphically stunning as MCE.

The IBM ThinkCentre S50 Ultra Small is the world's smallest 'full-function' desktop computer according to manufacturer IBM. Whether it's the world's smallest or not, it's certainly one of the smallest we've seen.

Along with the Sony Cyber-shot P-93, the Canon Powershot A95 is the big lad of this roundup with a pretty decent 5-megapixel CCD. The rest vary from 3-4-megapixel. While this does give the Canon a bit of an edge over the competition in terms of resolution and functionality, it's the camera's other attributes that cemented this unit in the top three.

The Twinhead Efio is a mixed beast. It has some very good features, such as an all-magnesium casing and ATI Mobility 9700, but it also has some middling features, like a relatively slow 1.8GHz Intel processor and 4:3 screen. The unit is well made and well set out however.

When it comes to accessories, the Aspire has one of the best bundles supplied for this roundup: including an MCE remote and a radio/TV antenna! It also has a decent specification list: 3Ghz Pentium 4; 160GB HDD; and 512MB RAM. The only sticking point here, amongst all this multimedia goodness, is the inclusion of the Mobility X300 video card. It's like building a Ferrari and installing a two-stroke motor. It doesn't make much sense.

We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

The Nikon Coolpix E3700 is the smallest camera here and by far the most pocketable. It features mag-alloy body, so that even though the camera's small, it's really sturdy. There's no hesitation involved in throwing this camera in a bag amongst your other gear.

PVX is designed as an office application but could as easily appeal to people wanting to make personal video calls.

LCDs are finally hitting the sweet spot for price and quality, which means we can all safely cast aside our CRTs.

The Shuttle XPC is an icon of SFF design, and there are as many iterations as there are chipsets.

Shuttle's SB95P is a small form factor (SFF) aimed at the enthusiast/gamer market, and it takes advantage of the i925 iteration of PCI-E. Though Shuttle are known for their XPC’s striking looks, in this case the colour scheme is nothing to write home about: is gun-metal anyone's favourite colour?